Monday, November 18, 2002

If the weather holds, I will call for two scrimmages this coming week. I’ve been talking to a lot of players via phone and e-mail, and I’ve been getting numerous inquiries from kids seriously thinking about coming to CSU in the future.

DOCTOR, DOCTOR, GIVE ME THE NEWS….

I am beginning my seventh season at CSU and I just had my fifth "surgical procedure" since I have been here. This time it was shoulder surgery last Tuesday. There is no specific CSU correlation, however, as I have had surgeons poking around in me off and on all through the years, and for a variety of mostly orthopedic reasons. Fourteen times in all now they have knocked me out and cut me open. Six times with the left knee alone. Five times with one doctor. I am just trying to hang on for dear life, using modern technology as much as possible. I am no Mark Sclerreth or anything (I think he had like 26 surgeries during his NFL career), but I really would like to stop (having surgeries). At the same time I am willing to do anything to keep coaching and leading this program. We are not yet where I want us to be.

My athletic needs are simple. I want to perform all functions that allow me to warm up goalies and also generally throw on the run, and catch the ball somewhat proficiently. I need to be able to run around enough so that I can demonstrate something that I want, or to have a hissy fit without tearing one sort of ligament or other. For the record, I am doing my rehab exercises, limited as they might be right now.

In general, post-surgical rehab time seems to get longer for me every decade. I’ll be in this fancy and versatile arm sling for 6 weeks. Velcro everywhere (I wish I had invented that stuff). I "sleep" sitting up. Oh yeah, I remember this….the shoulder/rotator cuff thing. Did the left one back in ’98.

SOMETIMES THE LEARNING TREE IS NOT A SPRAWLING OAK

The other day I was talking to someone about the concept of confidence. Where it comes from and where it goes. Stuff like that. I was talking about what happened to me in 1998 when I got Lyme disease in June (from a tic at a family picnic in upstate New York, not 20 miles from Lyme, CT), and funnily, the way this nasty little bug ended up doing something FOR me as a coach. It is safe to say that during the intense part of the disease I hit the low point in my life, first physically, but then later psychologically and emotionally as well, and for longer.

I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but there was a time when the recovery road seemed to have no foreseeable "light at the end of the tunnel". Some kind of 3/4 life crisis was mixed in there somewhere, perhaps. Dying sounded better than living at times, and for a time. I was weak. I had lost a bunch of weight. I’m small anyway, so that wasn’t really working for me. I looked like I had had two strokes, one on each side of my face, from some kind of nerve palsy. I was 46 and looked an unhealthy sixty. Can you say pathetic? I could barely see, and I had the Headache from Hell for months. The reason I couldn't see well was because the optic nerves that didn’t work were sending my brain strange and terrifying images. What I did see resembled a Fellini movie. I couldn’t tell where the things that I saw really were.

Coaching was pretty much the only thing I could summon the energy to do in that September of 1998. Besides the Lyme, I had shoulder surgery a week or two before fall ball had begun. I know that many players just coming here then (and they know who they are) were looking at me with grave doubts as to my ability to coach or have any effect on any team. How could I blame them? As much as I tried to hide it, how could they have not seen how depressed, etc. that I was? I could barely pronounce basic words without slurred speech, and even now, almost 5 years later, the connection from brain to mouth has a few crossed wires on those really cold days. Even some of the vets at the time didn’t quite know what to make of the new, much older looking and weaker version of "Coach".

My self-confidence was barely flickering as that winter approached. I was struggling in all parts of my life. Family, business, you name it. The only thing that didn’t scare me through all this being sick stuff, and the long recovery time to follow, was coaching this lacrosse team. The coaching to come in the spring of '99 kept me going. My vision for that team had somehow not been completely obscured during this total breakdown of my nervous system. Apparently you were going to have to kill me to do that. The only thing that I was sure that I could still do was to get my points across to a team. It seems ludicrous, and I don’t know how or why, but I didn’t doubt my own ability to coach, even though I doubted my ability to do pretty much anything and everything else

It (1998-99) was quite a journey, and seemingly there was magic involved somewhere, but by May of 1999 we were the USLIA champs. I was by then on the road to health, but hardly there. What a year it had been. We had gone to St. Louis, played the best we ever had, and won it all. In spite of where I personally had been, we ended up achieving our ultimate team goal, and we did it ahead of "schedule", for that matter. In my mind I had thought we weren’t quite ready to "win it all" yet, but there we were. It was en extremely validating experience. I learned a lot about trusting my "coaching instincts". I also learned a lot about getting the team involved. I needed their help, and they were there for me.

I look back at it now, and I see that I had somehow managed to learn coaching lessons and gain valuable confidence in myself as a coach during a personally very forgettable time. The power of a team can be incredible. I will always be grateful to that 1999 team for keeping the faith. It’s all good and all now, but I won’t be sending any thank you notes to the Big tic.


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